Robert Scoble was in our offices recently. Check out the two videos he filmed on Skytap here and here:
http://www.fastcompany.tv/video/demo-skytap-iphone-virtual-lab-testing-and-qa-enterprise-apps
http://www.fastcompany.tv/video/seattles-skytap-lets-enterprises-remotely-manage-your-datacenter
-Ian
William Fellows, a Principal Analyst, at 451 Group has just published a report on Cloud Computing. It’s one of the better reports I’ve seen and well worth a read (you can purchase it here).
William defines clouds as having the following attributes:
We think William’s criteria provide a good acid test to determine if a service really delivers the true promise of cloud computing. However, it’s also important to consider what types of applications you can run in the cloud. Too many of the current service providers have a proprietary model which doesn’t allow standard multi-tier applications written on Windows or Linux to be run in the cloud without major modifications. In addition to an API, we think it’s also important to have a self-service UI so an organization doesn’t need a team of technical support staff to integrate into the cloud.
Skytap enables our customers to take advantage of cloud computing now for application development, test, training and demo environments - any workload that necessitates dynamically spinning up and tearing down environments quickly and easily.
It’s great to see some consensus around the definition of a cloud-based service and, more importantly, to see exciting progress in the industry to realize the vision of true utility computing.
-Ian
Here on the Skytap engineering team, we recently switched to a monthly release cycle. Our aim is to iterate quickly, release every month, and loop back with customers to make sure we continue to delight them. To illustrate the benefits of such a rapid cycle, I’d like to make an aquatic analogy:
Imagine a muddy ocean with little visibility. Your customers are boating on the surface. You can only write code underwater, but you need to come to the surface to ship it (no pun intended). If you dive down for more than a minute you’ll drown, so you need something to keep you alive while you’re underwater. The technology you choose to keep you alive down there will make an enormous impact on what your software looks like when you come back up to the surface.
You can pick a snorkel or a submarine. Most peoples’ instinct would be “duh, give me the submarine!” But think about it for a second. A submarine needs fuel and a crew. It’s also expensive. And when you’re submerged for weeks on end, what happens to life on the surface?
Customers might motor away, they might be shouting “hey come back up here, we changed our mind about Widget X!” The whole world might change while you’re underwater.
In the shrink-wrapped software world, the submarine used to be a necessity. It’s just not possible to ship a new box of software every month. But with software-as-a-service, you can ship as often as you’d like. Our friends up the hill at iLike have a release every week!
That’s why we say “pick the snorkel.” We can dive down and surface quickly, we can swim from customer to customer to get feedback, releasing software unencumbered by excessive process and lengthy development cycles. The net result is customers who are more likely to recommend our virtual lab solution to friends and colleagues. At the end of the day, that’s our goal - successful and enthused customers!
-Joe
The June 2008 release of Skytap Virtual Lab went live this morning! A list of feature enhancements present in the June 2008 Release is provided below - thanks for your input and requests, many of them got into this release!
-Configuration and Virtual Machine Management
1. Automatic Configuration Timeout
Automatically shut down all of the machines in a Configuration by selecting the Automatic Configuration Timeout checkbox. Your Configuration will shut itself down after 30 minutes of idle time.
2. Improved Published Services
It’s easier to set up the most common Published Services with a new dropdown box highlighting available options.
3. Improved ease-of-use
Options to edit a Virtual Machine’s hardware and network settings are now sited along with your other Virtual Machine controls.
-Virtual Machine Sessions
1. VM Desktop Resize
Virtual Machines’ Desktops now automatically resize when you resize the VM Session Window.
2. VM Full Screen Mode
Virtual Machines can be used in full screen mode to provide a more immersive experience.
3. Hostname Display
Hostnames for individual virtual machines are now displayed alongside VM names to help differentiate the machines in your session.
4. Improved performance
VNC sessions are now routed through a secure proxy for significantly improved performance.
5. Copy and Paste
Windows guests created from new Configurations now support copy and paste from your browser through the Clipboard button. Please see the FAQs in Support for more information on adding this behavior to existing Windows guests.
-Library
1. Improved search relevancy
Searching in the Library has been improved so that it’s easier to find the content you’re looking for.
2. More Filters
Filter content in the Library by hard drive size in order to easily find Virtual Machines with large-enough disk sizes to fit your needs.
3. More labels
We have added new labels to help you better categorize your content in the Library.
4. Improved ease-of-use
It’s now much easier to merge a configuration in the Library with an already running Configuration.
-Asset Management
1. Shared Drive
Share data between yourself and other members of your account with the Shared Drive. This network share can be accessed from the Desktop of your Windows guests and through the SMB share \\gw\shared on Linux guests.
2. Asset Upload without Java
You can now upload assets from your physical hardware or your VM guests without installing Java.
Exciting news - we announced today at Structure 08 a technology partnership to make CohesiveFT’s Elastic Servers available in Skytap’s Virtual Lab platform! The combined solution will provide application development and test teams the capability to dynamically assemble and deploy custom application stacks to our virtual test cloud.
For the details, see the press release.
Despite all the benefits of cloud computing, there are some barriers to adoption. A recent panel on cloud computing at Interop 08 in Las Vegas, highlighted security and interoperability with in-house systems as key concerns for enterprises considering cloud computing.
This is a real issue for many enterprises with a large number of existing in-house systems which are not going away and must integrate with their cloud computing services. Many of these systems include proprietary software and sensitive data which organizations are reluctant to move into the cloud.
I would encourage customers evaluating cloud computing vendors to assess their security policies and architecture as well as their support for integration with in-house systems. On the security front, does the vendor’s data center implement comprehensive physical security policies? Has the application been architected from the ground-up as a secure multi-tenant solution? On the integration front, does the vendor provide an API to facilitate integration with your systems and processes? Does the vendor support secure mechanisms for connecting with your in-house systems?
At Skytap, we have recognize this need for some time and architected a highly secure multi-tenant solution supporting a “hybrid” model where some applications run in our “public cloud” but securely integrate and interoperate with in-house systems behind an organizations firewall. This allows organizations to selectively move some of their lab environments and applications to the cloud where it makes sense. For example, some companies may leverage Skytap as their sole QA and Training environment while others they may continue using an in-house QA & Training lab resources and augment with additional lab capacity from Skytap when required. Moreover, highly sensitive applications and data or systems that don’t run in the Skytap environment (e.g. mainframe) can remain behind the firewall yet fully integrate and interoperate with applications running in the Skytap virtual lab via a secure VPN connection.
Tell us your thoughts on barriers to adoption. What can cloud computing companies like Skytap do to better overcome these concerns?
Steve Brodie
Chief Products Officer
So, what are the benefits of cloud computing and why are organizations adopting these services? First and foremost for many is potential cost reduction and amortization. With a cloud computing solution, the customer does not have a big upfront capital expenditure for hardware, software licenses and implementation services. Nor do customers have the ongoing expense of administering the hardware and infrastructure software (e.g. patches). Instead, most cloud computing solutions offer a subscription or pay-as-you-go model, so customers pay a smaller recurring operating expense based only what they used which includes the hardware, software, and administration. This is particularly valuable in cases where an organization has unpredictable or fluctuating service demand . Instead of trying to perfectly predict demand and then potentially overprovision an in-house solution to meet the peak need “guestimate”, cloud computing customers simply increase or decrease their cloud computing service usage and payments to match exact point in time needs.
Another related benefit is overcoming an organizations data center capacity constraints and costs. Many Skytap customers tell us they are experiencing extreme data center capacity limitations. Their data centers are so full, that they need to remove a server for any server they add. Even many organizations working with hosting providers, tell us that their hosters have severe capacity constraints and can’t guarantee the space they need to grow. On top of this, power and cooling costs are skyrocketing and organizations need to be increasingly cognizant of how “green” they are and their carbon footprint. Customers working with a cloud computing solution avoid most of these issues and offload them to their cloud vendor. Moreover, cloud computing vendors, like Skytap, have a strong vested interest in building energy-efficient and eco-efficient data centers to reduce costs and attract customers.
Some of the biggest benefits for many customers are time to value and reduced risk compared to an in-house implementation. Most organizations want their solution up and running quickly so they can begin seeing the value. The time, expense and risk in developing and implementing an internal solution can be very extensive and adds no value until deployed. With cloud computing, customers typically see value almost immediately. Risk is significantly reduced since the vendor already has the solution running. And the vendor’s success is directly tied to customer success since customers can simply cancel their subscription if they are not happy or seeing value.
The benefits are pretty compelling, but customers do have some concerns about adopting cloud computing. In my next post, I’ll discuss some of the key customer barriers to adoption
Let us know what you think. What are the biggest benefits you see or expect to see from cloud computing and SaaS?
Steve Brodie
Chief Products Officer
Why the buzz?
There is an incredible buzz around cloud computing recently, with major articles in Business Week, InfoWorld, CIO.com and numerous other publications, blogs and analyst reports. Nicholas Carr has written a bestselling book on the topic called “The Big Switch”. And some of the biggest players in the cloud computing segment have announced incredible adoption numbers: Amazon announced more than 330,000 developers working on its Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform in January 2008 and Google signed up more than 150,000 developers for App Engine within one month of its April 2008 release.
With all this press and adoption, it is no surprise that many existing companies and new ventures are promoting their solutions as cloud computing. As with other heavily hyped technologies (e.g. SOA, Web 2.0), this buzz can make it very challenging for IT organizations to understand the technology, how it can help their business and which vendors are best suited to meet their specific needs.
What is cloud computing?
Let’s start with a definition of cloud computing. There seems to be emerging consensus on what cloud computing is, which I think the Wikipedia definition captures quite well. In my words, cloud-computing allows organizations to securely use 3rd party computing infrastructure and applications over the internet when they need it paying only for what they use. ‘Utility computing’ or ‘on-demand computing” is often used synonymously with cloud computing. These terms, however, may also refer to in-house implementations where the infrastructure is owned or managed by the IT organization rather than a 3rd party provider. Some have started to describe these as “private clouds” vs. “public clouds”.
We are admittedly a bit biased at Skytap, but we believe the hype around cloud computing is quite warranted. Our customers are successfully leveraging our Skytap Virtual Lab solution to reduce their costs, accelerate their time to market, and enable new business opportunities. In my next post, I’ll talk more about the benefits of cloud computing.
Steve B
Chief Products Officer
Our CTO, John Janakiraman, is delivering a session tomorrow on the ‘Eight Steps to a Virtualized Test Environment’. If you are at the conference, be sure to attend - it’s session W21 at 2.45pm.
There’s been a lot of hype around the need for ‘Green IT’ and how computing usage affects the environment. The 451 Group published an excellent report summarizing how IT impacts the environment and actually shows that IT’s greenhouse-gas contributions are relatively small when compared with other sources. However, its authors firmly believe that IT should assert its role as a positive force for change and embrace innovative technologies to improve energy efficiency across the enterprise.
According to VMware, there are between 2 and 5 application development servers for every production server deployed. Implementing a cloud-based virtual lab automation solution can dramatically reduce this ratio and improve energy efficiency and the environmental costs of manufacturing and disposing of servers. The combination of virtualization and a cloud-based service improves the situation in a number of ways:
We’re sure there will be lots more hype around ‘Green IT’. However, it’s clear to us that the shift to virtualization and cloud computing can only improve energy efficiency and IT’s impact on the environment. Virtual lab automation is a great way for application development and test teams to move in this direction.
-Ian